things that are better than i thought part 2

My butt has been famously sore regarding The Lawrence Arms for a while now (ie YEAH, MORE LIKE THE BORENCE ARMS and such), but yesterday, whilst staining the deck by headphones and moonlight, I stumbled upon a truth so shocking it BLEW MY MIND and I DIED. Namely that Oh Calcutta!, the band's 5th full length from 2006 is actually really good.
You see, due to the band's pedigree, I've given the first 4 LPs and EP collection an absurd amount of attention, which is patently weird/unhealthy considering how much I hate almost every song they've ever recorded. My partner has actually expressed concern regarding this, which seems pretty apt considering most people don't endlessly obsess over things they don't care for, but dammit, half of The Broadways make up this band. My hope had been that I was simply looking at TLA in the shadow of a behemoth (my favorite album, Broken Star), and that once I shook off this unfair comparison, I'd be able to cherish the band on their own unique, beautiful merits.
Unfortunately, clarity-of-opinion came when I beheld a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was "Lousy Songwriting", and "falling asleep" followed with him. A Guided Tour Of Chicago and Ghost Stories are just dull, half-written sub-Broadways-isms, and Apathy And Exhaustion and The Greatest Story Ever Told are a bunch of overproduced, riffless wisps alternating between half-memorable Brendan tracks and thousands of soggy, nearly identical McCaughan ballads. The auto-tune on Chris' vocals not only makes those albums sound like soft, flappy penises, but penises so soft they are frequently mistaken for liquids. Seriously, listen to "Your Gravest Words" and "Brickwall Views" back to back and tell me they're not fucking identical.
Needless to say, the hard work didn't really pay off. There are a few really great tracks floating around in the Ambien fog, and the lyrics are a particularly impressive mesh of literary and pop-culture references (see: The Greatest Story Ever Told), but hey, it'd be even more impressive if that same amount of effort was put into writing actual melodies and interesting arrangements.

I never bothered with Oh! Calcutta! based on this backdrop essentially, which is kinda funny seeing as the opening number, "The Devil's Taking Names", is one of my favorite songs of theirs. A few tracks in and I was incredibly surprised to not find myself unconscious in the paint tray, lungs slowly filling with wood stain (or some other, smarmy exaggeration like that). I'm going to have to assume that the intermediate period between TGSET and O!C! is to blame here, during which Brendan started the fairly straightforward punk rock band, The Falcon, and Chris finally decided against his strict adherence to the Wesley Willis school of songcraft. Oh! Calcutta! features the band eliminating the obvious binary of song-styles by actually collaborating more apparently on writing and vocal duties, resulting in an incredibly solid 12 tracks of high-paced melodic punk rock with great hooks and a kind of urgency the band never employed before. Brendan's never sounded fiercer, and sheds a lot of the punk-caricature cadence of his vocals, while Chris apparently concluded that using autotune on a punk album might be a little too hilarious for words, and started singing in the off-key, folky register he would later employ on his Sundowner project.
I've read that a lot of people saw this as a throwback to the band's first two records, but this really doesn't sound anything like the half-assed Midwest pop-punk that populated either LP. Essentially, this sounds like The Falcon if they had the kind of chemistry that comes with playing together for a decade.
I definitely need to let this album sink in a bit more, but I am honestly pretty excited by them for once. That's something I sorta figured would never happen unless the band slowly replaced all three members or stopped writing music entirely.
God I love when bands I hate suddenly become good and then go on hiatus for 7 years.

slag post #2

The Broadways' Broken Star is easily my favorite album of all time, and hasn't budged from that position since my friend introduced me to it back in 2005. Released in 1998, Brendan Kelly (previously of Slapstick), Chris McCaughan (previously of Tricky Dick), Rob DePaolo, and Dan Hanaway (also of Slapstick, but only on trumpet & vocals) created what stands for me as the high water mark of 90's pop punk, then dissolved pretty much immediately after.
I don't think I ever wrote about it in depth on any of my previous blogs, but only for the fact that reducing my relation to this band to a single post is an enormously daunting task. At this point, every song they ever wrote has been scorched into my psyche permanently, and despite that, I still feel an emotional need to give their discography a spin every couple months. To put that in perspective, oodles of bands I fucking obsessed over throughout my late teens have become like dulled swords to me at this point - still anchored to me by respect and sentiment, but very low on emotional usefulness and thus, not in regular rotation - but not The Broadways. I couldn't even tell you the last time I spun Indian Summer's discography or Defiance, Ohio's Share What Ya Got on my own whim, and I fucking hinged on that shit back in the day.
Somehow Broken Star and the swag of EPs collected (incompletely) on the Broken Van compilation still sound fresh to me as the day I first heard them, and I feel legitimately sorrowful that I missed their reunion last year at the Asian Man Records anniversary show. There's just something about the band's approach that I never tire of, and while I've grown to find some of the lyrics to be somewhat overstated, the conviction gets me every time. I've never felt any need for tattoos, but I still swear I'll get a tribute to them on me someday in the distant, rash decision-making future. Likely the namesake of my previous blog, in fact. Alcohol mandatory.
Shortly after, I arrived here:

I feel like all of that might create a frame of reference and qualify this largely disagreeable opinion:

The Lawrence Arms might be the most mystifyingly lame and disappointing bands I can think of in the entire pop-punk spectrum.
Lemme first say that I've been listening to this band above on and (mostly) off for years. During the earliest stages, I was utterly convinced that the folly was on my part when I didn't orgasm violently over Chris McCaughan and Brendan Kelly's current project. After all, how could two of the four members of a band that blew my skull open like a pipe-bomb-hidden-in-a-birthday-cake let me down so hard? Clearly, I was just setting the bar too high and/or treating them unfairly as an extension of their previous unit - one whose sentimental attachment and affection for could do nothing but hamper my judgment.
Still, I sauntered on, and eventually made my way to their 3rd and 4th LPs, Apathy And Exhaustion and The Greatest Story Ever Told, respectively. While the band certainly adapted a more discernible style here, they amazingly sounded even more pathetically limited and riff-less, this time glazed grotesquely with cheesy, sterile production and a shitload of wimpy, auto-tuned McCaughan ballads. On top of that, TGSET's namesake is one of my favorite books, so it was pretty disheartening to hear it's inspiration ringing through that limp stool of an album. Regardless, my wishy-washy nature kept these 4 discs spinning a few times a year, hoping one day I'd "get it" and be able to jack off to this shit like everyone else.
Finally, just a few days ago, I made a realization after not touching a single Lawrence Arms track for over a year: I wasn't off the mark at all in treating the band's first two LPs as extensions of The Broadways - their approach was almost exactly the same. It wasn't the familiarity, though, that did these guys in for me, nor the sentiment - it was the fact that the material was soggy and weak. Why?
Probably because Dan Hanaway made The Broadways as great as they were.
I had somehow overlooked this glaringly obvious connection for years, likely in lieu of not quite digging Hanaway's Honor System project (and thus, having not heard it since 2006). Upon hearing Tricky Dick's discography a few weeks ago - of whom Hanaway guitar'd for - it finally made sense. While the point is only really applicable to the first 7 or 8 songs compiled (their final recordings, I think), the guitarwork is fucking fantastic, and while it doesn't exactly clear boundaries in pop-punk, it textures the songs perfectly and delivers killer hooks with a tons of proto-Broadways lingo. This isn't to say that if he had joined in on the trio (or even took McCaughan's place) they would've necessarily been as amazing as the preceding unit, but it definitely makes me wonder. It suddenly doesn't feel like such a shock that The Lawrence Arms
didn't deliver the goods...
In Conclusion:

A Guided Tour Of Chicago and Ghost Stories sound like well-meaning, but unsatisfying outtakes of Brendan and Chris' previous band. Every time I wind up listening to them I find myself altering that line in Wayne's World and looping it compulsively:
"The Shitty Broadways? Are they any good?" "They suck."
That's actually less of a joke than it sounds. I tend to get plagued with thought loops. As for Apathy And Exhaustion and The Greatest Story Ever Told, it sounds like they finally got comfortable moving away from the sub-Broadways-isms of the past and saw the ticket to the kingdom in the form of a bunch of damp, sound-alike ballads and blinding high-res production.

 In Conclusion Pt 2:
I realize this post is pretty harsh and that my opinion means zip to anyone. Fortunately, I still like writing and voicing my opinion.

In Conclusion Pt. 3:
This song was the first piece of traveler-lifestyle ephemera that sparked my forays into the minimalist and risky. It's also one of my favorite songs ever:

slag post #1

What do you get when you cross "My life is directionless" with "I am apathetic to challenges because I have a near paralyzing fear of failure and growth due to a damaged psyche"?

A THREE MONTH HIATUS FROM THIS BLOG.

Oh the laughter and sides splitting like a watermelon slugged with a metal bat.

But anywaifer, I've been doing some settling down after a literal year of living nowhere for more than 2 months at a time (including a full 5 months spent somewhere new in the country every night), and I'm somewhat in shock. There are a load of nauseatingly graspable comforts abundant - comforts that kick pursuits such as this here blog's dick into it's torso - and as such, it's been a huge struggle trying to balance personal projects, work, and getting myself out of the house. I'm pretty down.

BUT HEEEEYYY, HOW ABOUT THEM TUNES?

I'm going to hesitate to call this a sign of maturity, but its occurred to me as of late that I'm becoming pretty sick of pop punk. Actually, "embittered" might be the better word for it, as there's still a great deal of music in that field that I'll likely take with me to the grave. Like, the master tapes. And all existing copies of the albums in question so the last remaining artifacts will be gradually deteriorating, lossy mp3s copied across generations. I don't think I can use cliches anymore without summoning a tidal wave of extended mockery. Anyway, here's band number one of many that adequately summarize my current gripes:

This was a slowly broiling pot of contempt. Really slowly. I even made an effort to see this band live a few months ago. Here's what you need to know: they're a 4 piece from Minneapolis who take influence from Jawbreaker, The Lawrence Arms, and Dillinger 4. They're signed to Fat Wreck. They're ex-Off With Their Heads and Rivethead. They play fewer chords than Screeching Weasel at half the tempo. Their song structures are about as complex as a map drawn in crayon from "here" down a squiggly line to "X", but drawn out into infinity. Their lyrics are actually pretty decent.
Everyone loves them.
It's that last bit that actually kicked off the musical purge I'm currently experiencing (if you couldn't guess by the dramatic paragraph break). I've admittedly spent a lot of time doubting myself when it comes to debasing critically hailed bands I'm not particularly fond of. For whatever reason, it's hard for me to trust my response outright, and I end up revisiting garbage like this again and again and agayne, typically under the pretense that I'm "missing something" or "haven't given them a fair chance". Of course, recently this waft of horseshit has battered my sinuses into fighting back, and here I am, laying a blow down on a band just because.
Well, not "just because". Writing a music blog is obvious ego masturbation. Also, Banner Pilot aren't really horseshit, but they certainly are boring and stupefyingly same-y. Like, really.
Make a mixtape featuring the three aforementioned influences and pop it in a teeny, shitty stereo. Then lay a king-size mattress on top and hit play (assuming you jerry rigged this so that you could somehow operate the stereo without being beneath the mattress). That's pretty much what this band sounds like - like a cover version of the muffled surface noise of those three bands, almost completely castrated of nuances, originality, and hooks you haven't heard ad infinitum. Originality's not the issue, though. I like lots of bands that aren't re-inventing the wheel (...wheel made of little solid music notes and instruments...). I mean, The Broadways are probably my favorite band ever, and they're pretty clearly indebted to Jawbreaker. It's the songwriting that bores up the joint. No one needs to hear the exact same mood repeated 10-13 times in a row with the same speed and delivery. Similary, no one needs to hear a 3 minute song with almost nothing in it 10-13 times in a row. It's the I was about to say their main problem is their adherence to pop song structures, but then I remember the song "48 Double Stack":

This song is just as predictable and pop-formatted as nearly every song Banner Pilot song bassist Nate Gangelhoff's written to date, and yet it's a fist pumping, catchy-as-some-virus-or-something, great fucking song I'll probably end up listening to for years. Something tells me the same thing happened to Nate as Chris McCaughan and Brendan Kelly of The Lawrence Arms - they remained stylistically stationary and blew their song-crafting loads on endless re-writes of the same handful of tracks.
That's the real problem with Banner Pilot - they're faceless. They have a likeable sound, but nothing about them really grabs me like the band's they stemmed from. Dear Landlord included. It's kind of a shame, because if you noted that incongruous statement in the first paragraph under the logo, I happen to enjoy Nick Johnson's lyrics. Sure, they're kind of overstated, and the perspective is that familiar white, middleclass manchild prose, but well, I'm a 23 year old white male from a lower/middle class upbringing.
That was probably obvious, though.